Megafire

by Michael Kodas

  Firefighters from around Arizona gather at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona, on July 1, 2013, to mourn the 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots who perished in the Yarnell Hill Fire the day before.

  Members of the Prescott Fire Department embrace at the memorial on July 1 for the Granite Mountain Hotshots after learning that all but one member of the 20-man crew perished in the Yarnell Hill Fire.

  Danny Parker, a firefighter in Chino Valley, Arizona, whose son Wade was among the Granite Mountain Hotshots who perished in the Yarnell Hill Fire, speaks to the press outside the hotshots’ fire station in Prescott. The Granite Mountain Interagency Hotshot Crew, part of the Prescott Fire Department, was the only hotshot crew in the nation that was part of a city fire department.

  Marcia McKee and Stanley Nesheim attend the July 1 memorial service in Prescott. McKee’s son, Grant, who had joined the crew just a few months earlier, was among the firefighters who died in the fire.

  A convict firefighter at the Enfield minimum-security prison runs to escape an out-of-control grass fire on the prison’s grounds in 1986.

  Bill McLaughlin, chief of the Elk Creek Fire Department in Jefferson County, Colorado, had been on the job for only five weeks when he helped lead the response to the 2012 Lower North Fork Fire, a prescribed burn set by the Colorado State Forest Service that spread into a neighborhood, killing three people and destroying 22 homes.

  In June 2012 Tom Scanlan, right, surveys the damage to his home and property in the Kuehster Road neighborhood of Littleton, Colorado, where the Lower North Fork Fire struck in March. Neighbor Bruce Ellis’s property was damaged by the fire, but his home survived.

  In April 2014 Marlys Swan stands in front of the chimney that is all that remains of her house, which was destroyed in Colorado’s Last Chance Fire in June 2012. The house that was built to replace it is in the background. Swan managed to save her dogs but lost all of her belongings in the fire. Cheatgrass, an invasive plant that uses fire to outcompete native grasses, was one of several drivers of the Last Chance Fire, which grew into one of the largest blazes in Colorado history. It ignited during a heat wave in which the state’s two most destructive fires to that date also burned.

  A helicopter flies through Poudre Canyon as flames scorch the forest south of the Cache la Poudre River. The High Park Fire made a run to the north on June 14, 2012. Flames crossed the river, causing a mandatory evacuation of residents of the Glacier View Meadows area.

  KARL GEHRING / DENVER POST / GETTY IMAGES

  On June 26, 2012, the Waldo Canyon Fire burned out of control from the mountains of the Pike National Forest into the Mountain Shadows subdivision in Colorado Springs, where it destroyed nearly 350 homes. It was the first time in Colorado history that a forest fire transformed into an urban firestorm.

  HELEN H. RICHARDSON / DENVER POST / GETTY IMAGES

  The foundations of some of the 347 homes that were destroyed when the Waldo Canyon Fire burned into the Mountain Shadows subdivision of Colorado Springs in June 2012.

  Jim Schanel, one of the most experienced wildland firefighters in the Colorado Springs Fire Department, was working as a structure protection specialist with a federal firefighting crew at the High Park Fire outside Fort Collins when the Waldo Canyon Fire burned into Colorado Springs and drew him back to his home department.

  Steve Riker was the incident commander for the Colorado Springs Fire Department during the Waldo Canyon Fire.

  Laura Hunt, whose cottage was washed away in a debris flow of boulders and mud that descended onto Manitou Springs, Colorado, when heavy rains sent floodwaters over the Waldo Canyon Fire burn scar in August 2013, meets members of the press after she dragged herself from the floodwaters with a broken leg and broken foot.

  On July 9, 2013, members of the Prescott Fire Department march out from a memorial service for the department’s 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots who were killed in the Yarnell Hill Fire. Nearly a quarter of the department’s firefighters perished in the disaster.

  Nearly a week after the Granite Mountain Hotshots died, 19 white hearses carried their bodies from the medical examiner’s office in Phoenix, through Yarnell, and back to Prescott, their home base.

  Brendan “Donut” McDonough, left, the only member of the Granite Mountain Hotshots to survive the Yarnell Hill Fire, greets other members of the Prescott Fire Department at a memorial for the hotshots at Prescott High School on July 2, 2013.

  Darrell Willis, the chief of the wildland division of the Prescott Fire Department, was instrumental in protecting the city from wildfires. Part of that protection was the creation of a crew to reduce hazardous fuels around the city. That crew evolved into the Granite Mountain Hotshots under Willis’s leadership.

  Conrad Jackson of the Prescott Fire Department was a high school science teacher before he became a full-time firefighter. He taught a firefighting class at Prescott High School in which several future Granite Mountain Hotshots received their basic training in firefighting.

  Claire Caldwell, the wife of Granite Mountain Hotshot Robert Caldwell, was close to the wives and girlfriends of the other crew members.

  Claire Caldwell reveals a tattoo of the Granite Mountain Hotshots’ logo while showing a love note from her husband, Robert, who was one of the 19 members of the crew killed in the Yarnell Hill Fire.

  17

  High Park

  Fort Collins, Colorado—June 9, 2012

  NOLAN DOESKEN WAS WORRIED, but he rarely let it show. After the Heartstrong Fire overran the Struckmeyer family in the waning days of winter, and the Colorado State Forest Service’s prescribed burn exploded into the Lower North Fork Fire that destroyed the Kuehster Road neighborhood and killed three of its residents a week later, Colorado’s state climatologist fretted that historic heat and drought were priming the state for an epic fire season. He was just as concerned about how he could get people to listen if he talked about it.

  “I get, every year, the opportunity to talk to hundreds, probably thousands, of people face-to-face,” he told me when I visited him in his office at Colorado State University’s Department of Atmospheric Science. “They will see what I showed them last year with one more data point added on, which is how we did last year.”

  Although his job title had him saying “climate” thousands of times, he rarely combined it with the word “change.” Not one of the 170 slides he had shown at the Colorado Farm Show that year discussed global warming.

  Nolan didn’t deny that Colorado and most of the West were warming and drying, but he stuck to the data. Coming to a conclusion about what it showed could alienate some of his most important audiences.

  “You see change,” he told one reporter. “I see variability.”

  Nolan is over six feet tall, with graying hair, a caterpillar mustache, wire-rimmed glasses, and a horsey grin. His enthusiasm for data can squeeze guffaws out of him as he looks at the driest of graphs. He’s the quintessential weather geek.

  Despite the huge and deadly wildfires of March, Nolan noticed that most of Colorado was just enjoying the early end to winter. “People were eating outdoors at all of the restaurants up and down the Front Range,” he said. “Even in the evenings. Even in the ski towns. People were saying, ‘This isn’t right, but it’s nice.’ ”

  But the weather was making Nolan increasingly uncomfortable. “We were running 10 to 15 degrees warmer than average, which meant that we were running a full five to six weeks ahead of average in temperatures,” he said. “May temperatures in late March.”

  Spring is when Colorado gets most of its moisture, but the high temperatures of 2012 didn’t come with any precipitation. Grasses that sprouted weeks early and trees that leafed out in winter sucked up what water was left in the ground. “The pleasantness was masking this incredibly rapid dry-out,” Nolan said.

  At the farm where he and his wife raise horses and chickens, two inches of dust covered corrals that in a normal March would have been thick with mud. Dust storms the sta
te had eliminated with soil conservation programs decades earlier came back in 2012 and were beyond anything Nolan had ever seen. Walls of soil hundreds of feet tall blew across the plains. Clouds of smoke sometimes followed.

  “If it gets dry enough, it doesn’t matter what conservation practices we’ve had,” he told me.

  The Lower North Fork Fire was another harbinger. “It burned right through snow,” he said.

  Still, he held out hope that a few big, soaking storms could bring back the water supplies and stop the fires.

  But the mountains turned brown rather than white. Peaks barren of snow late in the season can’t regain their white cover, even if they get a heavy snowfall. The albedo effect, in which dark ground absorbs heat from the sun that the white surface of the snow would reflect, warmed the mountains, ensuring that any new snow just melted off.

  And the sky wasn’t even trying to catch up.

  “Things fell apart in April and just went psshhh down the tubes,” Nolan said.

  Nolan saw that the conditions in 2012 looked much like they had in 2002, when the massive Hayman Fire climaxed what was, until then, Colorado’s worst fire season. Except that 2012 had warmed and dried out a month earlier.

  IN JUNE NOLAN FINALLY GOT a taste of wet, green spring during a vacation to Michigan. Back in Colorado, he saw his worst fears manifest themselves.

  Ten years to the day after the Hayman Fire ran more than 16 miles in 24 hours, Nate and Cindi Johnson were camping with their children on Crystal Mountain when they saw a puff of smoke where lightning had struck a ridgeline about 15 miles west of Fort Collins.1 A firefighter with the Rist Canyon Volunteer Fire Department—a donation-funded operation—tracked down the smoke on his ATV. Shortly after 9 a.m. a single engine air tanker (SEAT) began dropping retardant around the blaze. By the afternoon, the U.S. Forest Service, Colorado State Forest Service, Poudre Canyon Fire Protection District, and Poudre Fire Authority had joined the fight. But by then the blaze was unstoppable. “We watched 300-foot flames from 80-foot trees,” Nate told a Denver television reporter.

  The High Park Fire exploded the same distance, almost to the mile, from my home in Boulder as the Lower North Fork Fire had. But this time the thunderhead of smoke spreading from the mountains across the plains was due north rather than south. And unlike the Lower North Fork Fire, which firefighters contained in a few days, the High Park Fire would run wild for nearly a month.

  By the time I got to the growing cluster of satellite trucks and reporters along the Cache la Poudre River, the sheriff had already evacuated half a dozen neighborhoods, and he would be evacuating more for the next three weeks. Rist Canyon volunteers managed to save the historic, one-room Stove Prairie Elementary School while one of their own homes burned.2

  Two calls to evacuate went to Linda Steadman, a grandmother staying at the family cabin on Old Flowers Road, but both ended up in her voicemail. When a deputy and firefighter went to her property, a locked gate and the approaching fire turned them back. Two days later Larimer County sheriff Justin Smith confirmed her death.

  “Linda Steadman, mother, grandmother, sister and wife, perished in the cabin she loved,” her family said in a statement.

  The sheriff reported that Steadman’s cabin was just one of more than 100 structures that might have burned. He’d heard “very bad reports up in the Rist Canyon area.”

  Evacuees moved into motels, stayed with friends or family, or pitched tents at local campgrounds. By Monday, its third day burning, the fire had grown to 41,140 acres, and a Type 1 Incident Management Team—the highest level of disaster response in the nation—took charge.

  “The hope for containment today is tenuous—totally dependent on the weather,” Bill Hahnenberg, the team’s commander, reported. “We may be at 0 percent tonight.”

  With the weather remaining unseasonably hot, dry, and windy Hahnenberg cautioned that the fire would “grow dramatically” despite five heavy air tankers, five SEATs, and five helicopters bombing the fire from the air, along with 500 firefighters from around the country engaging it on the ground. Crews took rafts across the Cache la Poudre River, which ran black with runoff from the fire, only to retreat when the blaze nearly overran them. Twenty-foot flames raced at speeds up to 40 feet per minute.

  “It’s a very aggressive fire. Fuel driven, wind driven, and the winds have not been favorable,” Nick Christensen, Larimer County executive officer, reported. “The brush, timber, and grasses are very, very dry.”

  EARLIER THAT DAY the journal Ecosphere added fuel to a different fire when it published a study showing that changing precipitation patterns and increasing temperatures brought on by global warming would result in an increase in wildfires across more than 60 percent of the earth’s land by the end of the century.3 Nearly 40 percent would see more fires by 2050. Mid- to high latitudes, including the American West, would see the greatest increase in wildfires. One map indicated in red areas where climate models agreed there would be an increase in wildfires by 2100. Russia, China, Canada, and the United States looked like they were smeared with blood. Northern Colorado, where the High Park Fire was burning when the study was released, was the color of a fire truck.

  “We have good records from across the United States, both thermometers and satellite observations, and they all come together and they tell us that 2012 was the warmest year that the lower 48 has had since we started taking records,” Jim White, director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado, told me.

  June 2012, the warmest June on record in Colorado, had temperatures 6.4 degrees above average. “The conditions we saw in 2012 will be an average year in 2030,” Nolan Doesken told me. “And a hotter Colorado is a more-vulnerable-to-wildfire Colorado.”

  KATHARINE HAYHOE, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University and one of the authors of the paper in Ecosphere, was accustomed to fiery landscapes, both literally and politically.

  Like Nolan Doesken, she had close encounters with wildfires while doing her research. The year before her paper’s publication, Texas had 28,000 wildfires—more than twice what the state normally endures. The blazes included the Bastrop Fire, which destroyed nearly 1,700 homes, making it the most destructive fire in state history. It was one of nearly a dozen fires that destroyed homes that Labor Day. Another was at Possum Kingdom Lake, which burned twice that year. Katharine has a home there.

  “As a series of wildfires swept through central Texas lake country, first in April, then again in August, we went to bed night after night convinced that our place would be gone by morning,” Hayhoe wrote on the blog God’s Politics a few days after her paper was published. “With 100-ft. flames, near-zero humidity and 50 mph winds, all I can say is that we were lucky. Many of our neighbors, some a few hundred yards away, were not.”4

  The fire stopped 200 yards from her house. One of her neighbors lost her home to the first Possum Kingdom wildfire in April, bought a new house, and lost it to the August fire.

  “The fires were really unusual in terms of their speed and their ferocity and their intensity,” Hayhoe told me. “You barely had time to get out of the way.”

  Hayhoe held vigil from afar, staying up all night at her computer and sharing bits of news with neighbors. “When you have a personal connection, it just makes all the difference,” she said as she described photos of the fire. “You’re trying to figure out, ‘Is that your place?’ That burned skeleton with a washing machine sitting there between these burned beams?”

  So when the paper came out in Ecosphere, Hayhoe was happy to push it into the public sphere. “When you talk to people about climate change, you have to be prepared to tell them why you care,” she told me. “And it better not be some kind of airy, fairy reason. For me this was one more reason why I personally care. I can say, ‘Look, here’s the fire . . . Here’s what it did to our neighbors.’ ”

  Hayhoe knew she was in for more heat. She didn’t just share Nolan’s familiarity with wild
fire threatening the family home; she’d also experienced the consequences of reporting how human impacts on the climate are driving wildfires. Six months before the publication of her paper, presidential candidate Newt Gingrich dropped her chapter about climate change from his book about environmental entrepreneurship after conservative firebrand Rush Limbaugh lambasted the work of “the climate babe” on his radio program.

  “That was not the first time it had happened,” she told me. “I was on the O’Reilly [Fox News] show a couple years ago. I got over 200 hate mails the very next morning, and who knows how many blogs.”

  Hayhoe had published for years in scientific journals and never received a hateful email or been attacked in a blog. But that changed when she spoke of her research on climate and wildfire. “I’ve gone from zero to a constant background [of attacks],” she told me. “Every time you come out in some public way that climate change is real, the attacks peak, and they don’t go back down to where they started from. They keep at a bit of a higher level.”

  In her office in Lubbock, her finger traced the air like she was drawing foothills rising jaggedly into a mountain range. The air graph she drew of the political heat coming down on her mimicked graphs that I had in front of me showing the increase in temperatures and wildfires in the West.

  “So the next time it peaks higher, and then it drops back down to this level,” she said. “And the next time it peaks higher . . . There’s a couple of bloggers, I swear they probably blog about me on a weekly basis—people who seem to be fairly obsessed in ways that are a little bit . . . unhealthy.”